What’s Coming in WordPress 4.5 (Features and Screenshots)

The beta version of WordPress 4.5 was released last week. We followed the development closely, and we are excited to report that WordPress 4.5 is expected to be released during the second week of April, 2016. In this article, we will highlight what’s coming in WordPress 4.5 with features and screenshots.

This is the beta release, which means no more new features will be added until the final release of WordPress 4.5. However, please know that some of these features may not make it into the final release.

Theme Logo Support

Adding theme logo from customizer is a long awaited feature. WordPress 4.5 will add theme logo support to WordPress core.

Many premium WordPress themes already allow users to upload custom logo using their own options panel. With the core support for the feature, it would become possible for users to do that from the theme customizer.

Themes would be able to define support for logo with size values like this:

Improved Moderate Comment Screen

WordPress sends you an email notifications when there is a new comment submitted. Clicking on the approve, spam or trash link in the email will take you to a screen where you can see that comment with a button to perform the desired action.

This screen does not allow you to edit a comment. It also does not show you any formatting in comment text, which isn’t pleasant.

With WordPress 4.5, you will get to see an improved screen. It will show you the formatting in comment text as it would appear in the browser. It will also have a link to edit the comment.

Responsive Preview in Customizer

WordPress 4.5 will bring another cool addition to the customizer. You would now be able to see responsive previews of your site directly in the customizer.

You can click on the device icon at the bottom to switch the view between devices. Currently it shows Desktop, tablet, and mobile device previews. This gives you a generic idea of how your site would look on these devices.

Optimized Image Size Generation

WordPress introduced responsive images in WordPress 4.4. This means that since 4.4, users on smaller screens get to see a smaller image appropriate for their screen.

This feature is great as it not only improves performance of websites on smaller screens, it also saves them money on data plans.

WordPress 4.5 will improve this further more. It will optimize images further to reduce their site upto 50% without any visible quality loss.

Allow Users to Login Using Email Address

It is hard to keep track of all the usernames we use across all the different sites. This is why many popular sites like Facebook, Twitter, and others allow their users to use their email address as username.

While you can easily forget your username, most people don’t forget their email address.

In the past, WordPress didn’t allow users to login with email by default. This is expected to change in WordPress 4.5.

Since each WordPress user on your site already has an email address associated with their account, they will now be able to use their email address to login.

Developer Features

WordPress 4.5 will bring many under the hood improvements for developers. Here are some of the exciting improvements for developers:

Selective Refresh in Customizer – In customizer if a change has to be applied the entire page has to be reloaded. WordPress 4.5 will come with a robust framework allowing selective refresh in the customizer. This will make it incredibly fast, and it will allow developers to do great things with live previews. (#27355)

Customizable Embed Templates – WordPress 4.4 also introduced embeds which allowed users to embed posts from their own and other WordPress blogs. WordPress 4.5 will make the embed templates customizable so that theme authors can have custom displays. (#34561)

41 Comments

Ok, the update removed all the “open in external tab” check marks and all of my “no follow” links. None of the ‘no follow” plugins are working. I also had to remove other plugins. Please help! I already was dinged by Google.

Automatic WordPress 4.5 update destroyed my front page. I use twenty eleven with content left. After the update the content became centered! And the right side column is now below the content on the right hand side. Why? And how can I fix it? My blog is . Thank you

My question is, where did the editor go? I usually go into the dashboard, click on appearance and in the drop down click on “editor” so I can edit my home page and sidebars, etc. It’s hand coded and I need to update a video on my home page and can’t find home.php, which is usually under appearances –> editor.

Pavan — The backticks for code should be working. I just tested today in the latest beta version.

Developers decided NOT to move forward with the **bold** or __italic__ text patterns. And a single hash (#) was never a valid text pattern. The h tags start with ## for h2, and run through ###### for h6. h1’s are not supported.

This is nice, but simple, common sense requests that I and others have been asking for, are ignored and there seems no way to communicate what we want or to get answers on how to code it for ourselves. I NEED to be able to limit posts by category, per page. Seems simple, if you know how to code in WP speak, but I don’t. I would be happy to buy a plug in to do this, but don’t know where to go to find such a thing. Have googled and everything else I can think of, to no avail.

Hai Dan,
Would it solve your issue when using Gravity Forms?
I can imagine you make a page with a form where you have a mandatory choice of the post type categories you allow. GF also supports other post elements to create a new post from.
Hope this helps. Just mail me if you have more questions.
Best.
Jan

Hmm… my initial reaction to the new ability to sign in using email is… WORRIED! Seems like this gives the bad guys more ways to try to hack in — and now we must make sure all users have strong passwords in more places. What am I missing here that will assuage my fears ?!

There’s also a great plugin that adds simple table creation tools to the TinyMCE editor: MCE Table Buttons plugin. I’d recommend this if you need a simple solution. TablePress is great, but much more robust.

Really nice updates to WordPress in 4.5, I really like the ability to login with email as I have some websites I manage where clients have had to use their usernames or I have had to implement a plugin to make this happen. Also the responsive quick click button in Optimizer is something that I think will add to the UI.

Some great developer features. When are you guys going to add a “Search Pages” field to an existing page so we don’t have to click on “Pages” in the Dashboard sidebar and then enter the search term in “Search Pages”? Something to think about for the next update!

Thanks for the roundup. With this release I see WordPress continuing to tinker around the edges (native support for responsive images in v4.4 being a notable exception). For such an established platform that powers so many websites, I’m amazed at the number of features it lacks. Some quick-off-the-top examples:

• Native support for enabling PHP in posts and widgets
• A feature to restrict site access to individual IPs or IP ranges
• Ability to temporarily post site maintenance message instead of site content

Hi Enrique — I’ve dealt with a few hacked sites in the past year, so I feel your pain.

However, the WordPress core code is incredible secure. It’s really not a problem with WordPress itself, but more of an issue with vulnerabilities in plugins & themes, to go along with weak passwords and user ignorance about general security practices.

I’m not saying there aren’t ways WordPress could continue to improve security, but we want to be careful not to make it so difficult to login that your average user can’t access their own site.

I see a lot of responsibility for designers, developers & those setting up the sites to educate users, and setup proper security measures.

WordPress 4.4.2 lets you bruteforce wp-login.php as many times as you want. Each time you login, it does a database query and can fill up server connections especially if coming via a botnet all over the place.

All WordPress core would need to do, is record the time of the last attempt, and if it happened within the last 3 minutes, deny any subsequent attempts from anyone.

This means no database calls, no multiple web server processes, etc. It would just be a simple text deny.

Little things like this can be really important. You might suggest there are work arounds to prevent this, but this is something that should be part of the core itself.

I really hope WordPress has some small (but important) security enhancements in the future, to stop botnets from hitting xmlrpc and wp-login.php whever they want on a default WordPress install.

As a WP Beginner i’m always in trouble with templates. It needs a long time to edit the template structure. I think it comes much easier and faster if there is a click and edit option. Meaning… if you click on any section in the preview, the customizer will show you the editable things in the menu on the left side (like background color, static picture, video, logo, address, txt etc.)
As an idea only….

Tom, something similar to this is being implemented with 4.5 (if I understand it correctly). You’ll be able to hold down the SHIFT key and click on various elements in the preview pane, and the corresponding setting will open up on the left.

Just started up a new site last week, and glad to see the email login and comments changes. More and more this confirms that I’d rather stick with native comments and use add-ons to add functionality, rather than getting an outside comments tool.

This update would be a great enhancement regarding basic controls over a WordPress site.

I wish WordPress offers all basic controls by default for necessary configurations. For example, almost every site has a logo and favicon. Favicon upload option has given already and now logo option as well. Awesome!

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